An unofficial blog about the National Museum of Health and Medicine (nee the Army Medical Museum) in Silver Spring, MD. Visit for news about the museum, new projects, musing on the history of medicine and neat pictures.

Pages

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

July 15: NLM History of Medicine Lecture

You are cordially invited to the next NLM History of Medicine lecture, to be held on Tuesday, July 15, from 2pm to 3pm in the Lister Hill Auditorium, Building 38A, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. As its Annual James H. Cassedy Memorial Lecture, we are proud to present Dale Smith, PhD, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, who will speak on "Anatomy Acts and the Shaping of the American Medical Profession's Social Contract."

Since the time of the Hippocratics, physicians had been offering society a community of practitioners committed to patient care, high moral values, and lifelong learning, but societies across the ancient world and early modern Europe were reluctant to set physicians apart. In the early United States, the exceptionalism of physicians was less widely acknowledged because of the Jacksonian emphasis on self-sufficiency. Colonial licensure laws which tried to register qualified practitioners were repealed. Medical education was voluntary, variable, and completely self-funded; schools were owned by the faculty and operated as proprietary ventures. The medical sects – botanic, hydropathic, homeopathic – were often accepted but had little in the way of professional discipline. Physicians wanted to be set apart as a profession, but American society did not accept the offer of professionalization until after the Civil War, when 'regular' physicians reaped the benefits of their wartime service. Ultimately the American system of licensure based on examination was instituted by states and affirmed by the courts. In return for the promise of good medicine today and better medicine tomorrow, the profession of medicine obtained legal protection, subsidized education, and socially supported and separately financed practice venues. As part of this transformation, anatomy acts were passed by the individual states: they were, in many cases, the first move to affirm a "social contract" between physicians and the communities they served.

No comments:

Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

Guide to the Collections of the NMHM 2014 (pdf link)

Disclaimer

The opinion or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology or the National Museum of Health and Medicine.